7 ms·

>It's also falsifiable. And the world does prove it false. If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%. There isn't one out there t

by treis 6y ago

>It's also falsifiable. And the world does prove it false. If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%. There isn't one out there that spends a majority of their budget on infrastructure. The expensive things are cops and schools and fire and other labor intensive services. The municipalities that have gone bankrupt the issue has almost always been an inability to pay pensions. With the other ones caused by financial fraud and/or mismanagement. For the life of me I can't understand why people keep posting this Strongtowns nonsense. Their core hypothesis is easily probable wrong and they post the silliest numbers. Like this one pegs Lafayette's infrastructure replacement at 32 billion. Yet Lafayette's entire budget is only 0.6 billion. Since they haven't spent the entire budget for last 50+ years on infrastructure that 32 billion is obviously nonsense.

ebg13 6y ago
I think you're misinterpreting both the numbers and the argument and then taking away a backwards conclusion from that misinterpretation. > If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%. The article says exactly this. > There isn't one out there that spends a majority of their budget on infrastructure. So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. Unless you think that the city is pocketing billions in profits from unspent tax money (they aren't), it's hard to see how they could possibly spend more on infrastructure without majorly cutting other services and/or taxing more than the people can afford, which is the premise of the article. > The expensive things are cops and schools and fire and other labor intensive services. These costs scale most directly with population, not land area. You'd have these same expenses if the city were built such that the road infrastructure cost less to maintain, so pointing at them makes no sense. > Like this one pegs Lafayette's infrastructure replacement at 32 billion. Yet Lafayette's entire budget is only 0.6 billion. The article is about how Lafayette cannot keep up with maintenance because it would cost too much. Literally exactly the same thing as what you just said, and yet your conclusion is that they have it wrong? Why?
- treis 6y ago
  >So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. We've had sprawling suburbs in this country since at least the 50s. In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt from infrastructure or have infrastructure costs come to dominate the budget. And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. The only conclusion from those set of facts is that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed. And indeed it is. For all their case studies and imaginative math they have one glaring and fatal flaw. They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure.
  - ebg13 6y ago
    > And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. > They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure. Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies using state and federal emergency grants. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. > In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt Only half of states even allow municipal bankruptcy by law, and _many_ cities require more money to come in from outside than they are able to generate themselves.
    - treis 6y ago
      >Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. Show me potholes for miles in Lafayette, LA. Show me all the people poisoned there from heavy rains. Or all those people flooded out of their houses. >Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. Pick one and let's break it down.
RhodoYolo 6y ago
Yeah - I own a consulting company helping suppliers navigate the procurement process of state, local and federal procurement. None of these numbers check out and since it's municipal data it's all subject to a FOIA request. This is my first article i've read by this company and it didn't really seem to have a conclusion besides spreading obviously false data.
- rdtwo 6y ago
  Can you provide the actual numbers for comparison
- chrisdinn 6y ago
  Chuck Marohn is a well-respected planner with decades of municipal experience. He’s written books on this topic. You can watch him give his usual anti-suburb talk on YouTube. He’s especially good at reaching tough, conservative audiences, I think. In his broader body of work he does a good job of talking actual numbers and why they’re a lot higher than you’d think.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    The only Strongtowns article I've read that was about an area I know personally was factually and historically inaccurate.
vannevar 6y ago
Just some back-of-the-envelope calculations: Louisiana population 4.65M Lafayette population 126k Miles of road in Lousiana: 130k (https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/ https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/) Assume Lafayette's share of road miles is proportional to population, and you get around 3500 miles of roadway around Lafayette. Minimum paved road construction cost is ~$2M/mile, according to https://www.artba.org/about/faq/#:~:text=Construct%20a%20new%202%2Dlane,per%20mile%20in%20urban%20areas https://www.artba.org/about/faq/#:~:text=Construct%20a%20new.... So a very conservative road replacement estimate for Lafayette is about $7B, and that's just the roads. The Strongtowns figure may be off, but it's likely the right order of magnitude.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  For existing roads, you will not be reconstructing them from scratch. Instead, you will be repaving them, leaving subgrade as is. This brings a cost down order of magnitude below what Strong Towns claims.
- treis 6y ago
  No, it's obviously wrong. 7 billion is spending the entire city budget on just roads for 12 years. Stretching that to a 40 year timeline means that Lafayette would have had to spend ~25% of their budget on building roads alone for your figure to be accurate. They didn't so your number is wrong.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - vannevar 6y ago
    You're assuming that the city had to pay for the roads entirely themselves, which of course they didn't. My intent was not to explain how Lafayette paid for their roads, it was only to say that the $32B replacement figure was plausible.

by treis 6y ago

ebg13 6y ago

I think you're misinterpreting both the numbers and the argument and then taking away a backwards conclusion from that misinterpretation. > If you look at municipal budgets infrastructure is usually around 10%. The article says exactly this. > There isn't one out there that spends a majority of their budget on infrastructure. So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. Unless you think that the city is pocketing billions in profits from unspent tax money (they aren't), it's hard to see how they could possibly spend more on infrastructure without majorly cutting other services and/or taxing more than the people can afford, which is the premise of the article. > The expensive things are cops and schools and fire and other labor intensive services. These costs scale most directly with population, not land area. You'd have these same expenses if the city were built such that the road infrastructure cost less to maintain, so pointing at them makes no sense. > Like this one pegs Lafayette's infrastructure replacement at 32 billion. Yet Lafayette's entire budget is only 0.6 billion. The article is about how Lafayette cannot keep up with maintenance because it would cost too much. Literally exactly the same thing as what you just said, and yet your conclusion is that they have it wrong? Why?

treis 6y ago
>So what you're saying is that the city doesn't spend what it would cost to actually keep up with maintenance. They're saying exactly the same thing. We've had sprawling suburbs in this country since at least the 50s. In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt from infrastructure or have infrastructure costs come to dominate the budget. And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. The only conclusion from those set of facts is that Strongtown's argument is fundamentally flawed. And indeed it is. For all their case studies and imaginative math they have one glaring and fatal flaw. They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure.
- ebg13 6y ago
  > And we continue to have roads and sewers and so forth. Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. > They can't point to one city or town and say this city is no more because they couldn't afford their infrastructure. Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies using state and federal emergency grants. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. > In that time we haven't really seen any municipality go bankrupt Only half of states even allow municipal bankruptcy by law, and _many_ cities require more money to come in from outside than they are able to generate themselves.
  - treis 6y ago
    >Crumbling ones that don't receive all of the needed maintenance, yes. Potholes for miles, yes. Rail that breaks down daily, yes. Water systems that are one bad rain away from poisoning everyone or flooding a million people out of their homes, yes. Show me potholes for miles in Lafayette, LA. Show me all the people poisoned there from heavy rains. Or all those people flooded out of their houses. >Literally every city I look at can't afford upkeep on its infrastructure. They sidestep this by just not paying for all of the needed maintenance and only ever dealing with the worst emergencies. That's very much not the same thing as everything being peachy. Pick one and let's break it down.

RhodoYolo 6y ago

Yeah - I own a consulting company helping suppliers navigate the procurement process of state, local and federal procurement. None of these numbers check out and since it's municipal data it's all subject to a FOIA request. This is my first article i've read by this company and it didn't really seem to have a conclusion besides spreading obviously false data.

rdtwo 6y ago
Can you provide the actual numbers for comparison
chrisdinn 6y ago
Chuck Marohn is a well-respected planner with decades of municipal experience. He’s written books on this topic. You can watch him give his usual anti-suburb talk on YouTube. He’s especially good at reaching tough, conservative audiences, I think. In his broader body of work he does a good job of talking actual numbers and why they’re a lot higher than you’d think.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  The only Strongtowns article I've read that was about an area I know personally was factually and historically inaccurate.

vannevar 6y ago

Just some back-of-the-envelope calculations: Louisiana population 4.65M Lafayette population 126k Miles of road in Lousiana: 130k (https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/ https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/) Assume Lafayette's share of road miles is proportional to population, and you get around 3500 miles of roadway around Lafayette. Minimum paved road construction cost is ~$2M/mile, according to https://www.artba.org/about/faq/#:~:text=Construct%20a%20new%202%2Dlane,per%20mile%20in%20urban%20areas https://www.artba.org/about/faq/#:~:text=Construct%20a%20new.... So a very conservative road replacement estimate for Lafayette is about $7B, and that's just the roads. The Strongtowns figure may be off, but it's likely the right order of magnitude.

xyzzyz 6y ago
For existing roads, you will not be reconstructing them from scratch. Instead, you will be repaving them, leaving subgrade as is. This brings a cost down order of magnitude below what Strong Towns claims.
treis 6y ago
No, it's obviously wrong. 7 billion is spending the entire city budget on just roads for 12 years. Stretching that to a 40 year timeline means that Lafayette would have had to spend ~25% of their budget on building roads alone for your figure to be accurate. They didn't so your number is wrong.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vannevar 6y ago
  You're assuming that the city had to pay for the roads entirely themselves, which of course they didn't. My intent was not to explain how Lafayette paid for their roads, it was only to say that the $32B replacement figure was plausible.